This invention relates to a resiliently yieldable spring disc and, more particularly, to a spring disc which constitutes an improvement over a conventional Belleville spring.
As is well known, a Belleville spring consists of an apertured disc made of spring metal and having a generally frustoconical shape. When force is applied to the spring in an axial direction, the spring deflects and initially exerts a relatively high resistive force which increases rapidly as a non-linear function of the deflection of the spring. With continued deflection of the spring, the resistive force exerted by the spring decreases gradually as a substantially linear function of deflection until the spring toggles and once again exerts a force which increases non-linearly with deflection. With many applications, only the linear force/deflection characteristics of the spring are usable. Also, in many instances, one or more pairs of Belleville springs are stacked back-to-back in order to reduce the overall spring rate.